“Don’t like to remember nothing anymore,” the big man murmured, shaking his head. His huge hands lay like infielder’s mitts on his denim-covered legs.
“Was Nick happy, Tuesday?”
“Nick, he was always happy,” Leroy said slowly.
“He say anything about meeting someone?”
“Tuesday?”
“Yeah, Leroy. Remember, he died Tuesday night?”
Leroy began to blubber. “Oh, jeez—”
Quinn pulled his chair up closer. “Tell me how it was when you found him.”
“Remembering’s hard, Mr. Quinn. Nick, he was good to me. Never had nobody good like that. I don’t know what I’m gonna do—”
“The alley door was open.”
Leroy shut his eyes. “It... it was, sir. I went in. I found him. Nick’s head was—”
The lieutenant waved a futile hand and went over to the small rust-stained sink, rinsed out a plastic cup and grimaced down some bad water. It tasted like dead fish had been rinsed in it. He was looking at the rest of the water when a thread began snaking out in his mind.
Nick’s aquarium.
Sitting back down, he looked at the big, retarded man. “You found Nick, Leroy. You got Sampson next door to call us. Then you went back and waited like you should’ve.”
Leroy nodded.
“And Nick never got to feed his guppies. You mean you let Nick’s guppies go without food?”
Suddenly Leroy looked hurt. “Sure I fed ’em, Mr. Quinn. I wouldn’t let ’em — I mean, I know not to touch any—”
“But just feeding fish, that isn’t gonna hurt, huh, Leroy?”
The big man looked relieved. “It seemed all right to do.”
“Okay. Now, something else that seemed right? Anything. Straightening up things, just a little. You see, everything was neat, too neat.”
Leroy’s face went blank, the eyes shut, then the face began to wrinkle up as the thoughts slowly came out inch by inch from the bottom of the retarded brain.
“Tea cups,” Leroy said.
“Tea cups?” Quinn said, puzzled.
Leroy nodded. “On... on the table. Pretty tea cups. And the tea in them would stain them if they were left like that. So I washed both, like I knew Nick would want me.”
“And that’s all?”
After some more thinking, Leroy said: “Yes sir. I didn’t do wrong, did I? Nick, he saved those for special times. Like when you visited him.” He paused. “Or Miss Anna.”
The lieutenant slammed the door behind him. The sky was washed in a faded orange with the late afternoon sun slanting through the smog. He cut his car out of the alley onto Purple Avenue, thinking of Nick Rizzo quietly rinsing his tea cups, his special set, for their rare use.
Still, he was not sure. Anna, the way she was, it made him sick to ask her. In the second pawn shop on Jefferson he found the big display of diamond rings in the window.
The owner’s name was Green and he looked with disinterest at the badge afixed to Quinn’s wallet. “You’re not going to ask me to look through all my receipts, are you, Lieutenant?”
“Not unless you got a good memory. Nick Rizzo.”
“Oh, certainly! Mr. Rizzo was in here Monday and bought a diamond ring. Like I told that funny little man—”
“Kippy.”
“That’s the name. Like I told him, I sold it to Mr. Rizzo for two hundred. He was quite happy. Frankly, so was I. I don’t often make that kind of sale.”
That was Nick, Quinn thought. His fidelity to tradition, to protocol. A proposal of marriage was never to be slighted. It required all the formality, all the special touches. The special tea cups.
Green reached under the glass counter and displayed a diamond ring. “This is it.”
Quinn nodded. “You mean like it.”
“No, this is it. Which is what I told Mr. Kippy. I mean, here I sell Mr. Rizzo the ring on Monday, and a Mr. Smith sells it back to me yesterday.”
“Describe Smith.”
The description, which fitted Jess Newman, made the tie that Quinn suspected, but as he drove to Brunner’s and saw all the pieces swimming in front of him he couldn’t set them right. He began to wonder if he wanted to.
The dinner hour crowd jammed all tables and stools in the small cafe as Quinn scanned the place for Anna’s thin frame. Finally he grabbed a stout little waitress as she tried to elbow by him.
“Anna. Where is she?”
“Dunno, mister. She’s been pretty sick today. While ago, maybe an hour, she was serving coffee to a cop. They talked a little and then the next thing I know she’s gone. Now I gotta move, mister.”
Quinn went back to see Joe Brunner in the kitchen. He was sweating over the griddle that crackled with greasy chops and burgers.
“Anna,” Brunner growled. “Left me shorthanded, that broad! Right out the door!” He slammed a plate of steaming pork chops on the steel serving counter. “Listen, some days she’d come in here, Miss Queen herself. But lately she’s been tight like a drum. Said I wasn’t paying her enough. Man, sixty-five is all I can afford.”
“Address?”
“Brookside apartments on Bell Street. Hey, you see her, tell her maybe I can raise her ten.”
“She’d still want more,” Quinn said.
The ancient globe-like street lamps flickered, then came on full as Quinn parked in front of the two-story apartment building. He found her name on the panel of mail boxes just inside the entrance. Halfway down the hallway he hesitated at her door. His instinct was to knock, but instead he opened it quickly.
The small apartment was a shambles, a pig sty. Wads of paper, soiled bedding and in the bathroom on the floor he found an empty ring container. Newman supplied her and got back at Nick Rizzo that way, he thought. Then, when the cop mentioned Jess was busted, Anna went looking for free Smack. Quinn could see a half-dozen empty heroin bindies, small squares of paper. He kicked the basket, scattering its contents across the floor.
As he went back down the hallway, a door cracked open and a slim, wrinkled face of a woman peered out. “You looking for that Falcone woman, too?”
The lieutenant stopped. “Whatdya mean ‘too’?”
“Maybe an hour ago, a big man. I felt sorry for him, I mean he was sort of slow and he was breathing heavy like maybe he’d been running.”
“And what’d you tell him?” “That she got phone calls from the Kitty Bar the last week or so. We only got the hallway phone, and I’d always have to—”
He managed to cut the twenty minute drive to fifteen, but Leroy was on foot and he didn’t have the traffic to worry about. When he arrived, the bar was crammed to the walls with its mangy patrons. Quinn elbowed slowly through and at the stairway took it in three steps.
When he threw open the door to Newman’s room, Leroy stood in the middle of the floor, staring at the bathroom. Turning slowly to face Quinn, he held out his big hands apologetically.
At the bathroom doorway Quinn looked in at the skinny woman, still in her waitress uniform, but the uniform was soaked nearly tan with an addict’s sweat. He felt her bent neck for a pulse, but there was none. Against the wall above the toilet he could see the damp spot where Leroy had flung her. Her sleeve on her left arm was rolled up, revealing the blood trail from the needle mark.
The basin had the pieces — the spoon, burnt matches and the torn bindle.
The hypo lay crushed on the dirty floor.
“She was bad doing that, wasn’t she, Mr. Quinn?” he heard Leroy say from the other room. “Nick, he always said them were the worst people.”
Quinn drew the back of his moist hand across his mouth. He glanced around for a bottle, anything with a trace of alcohol in it.
“I kept asking her why, Mr. Quinn. I mean she didn’t have to kill him. She said she was sick and needed money and Nick wouldn’t give her none. She said Nick called her a junkie and said here he went and bought a ring for a junkie—”